The costumed characters from Times Square tend to come early, so there will be room for their giant heads.

“They come here every day,” said Lupe Rivas, one of the owners of Margon, a beloved Latin luncheonette in Midtown Manhattan. “The Statues of Liberty were the first. Then the others started coming.”

Margon — “New York’s Best Kept Secret Since 1970,” according to its sign — is steps away from Times Square, but its entrance is almost hidden amid a jumble of signs, for a nail salon, an Indian restaurant and a barbershop, and the crowd at the long, narrow luncheonette includes few tourists.

Instead, one finds the likes of Minnie Mouse, Batman and Strawberry Shortcake taking a break from posing for photographs, ticket-sellers in red windbreakers, police officers, construction workers and office workers in suits and ties.

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The lunch special at Margon — meat and a heaping pile of rice, beans and sweet plantains — costs $10.90 and comes with a soda.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

The restaurant originally opened around 1970 down the street, replacing a luncheonette called Luxor. Margon’s first owners were three Cuban cousins. They served Cubanos and café con leche to workers from the diamond district.

In the 1970s, Margon moved to a squat little space at 136 West 46th Street that, according to longtime regulars, had been a Peruvian go-go bar. The restaurant was later taken over by Ms. Rivas and her husband, Rafael Rivas.

The Rivas family is from the Dominican Republic; they expanded the menu, adding baked chicken, oxtail, fried chicken chunks, empanadas and tamalelike pasteles. The lunch special, meat and a heaping pile of rice, beans and sweet plantains, costs $10.90 and comes with a soda, like Materva Yerba Mate or Colombiana.

The special is known for its hearty, sleep-inducing properties. “You go back to the office, struggle through the next three hours and go home,” said Jonah Block, a lawyer having lunch with a colleague.

The octopus ceviche, or pulpo, has a different reputation, Ms. Rivas said. “A Mexican woman who works at a bank near here has two children and she blames Margon,” she said in Spanish. “She says it was the pulpo,” she continued, laughing. “I tell her, ‘It wasn’t just the pulpo!’

“There are many babies of Margon.”

That day, a chef and a language teacher sat eating Cubanos and talking “about good women, about bad women, about everything,” said Kristopher Pabón, the teacher.

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The luncheonette draws construction workers and the suit-and-tie crowd alike, but few tourists.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

Nearby, Andy Señor Jr., the associate director of the musical “On Your Feet!,” chatted with friends. “I come here all the time,” he said. The actor John Leguizamo used to come between auditions with his mother, according to Ms. Rivas, and he still stops by. An episode of “30 Rock” was filmed here.

Margon has remained comfortingly unchanged through the years: orange tables, plastic trays, a radio playing love songs in Spanish. Behind the counter are various members of the Rivas family.

Then there is the tall, slender man who clears trays and accommodates diners as they crowd in at lunch time. He makes tables appear when it seems there are none, slinking through bodies like the subtlest maître d’. The man, Antonio Fabiano, is not, in fact, a Margon employee.

Mr. Fabiano, from Brazil, is known as “El Chino,” or “the boy,” and indeed, he looks younger than his 80 years. He used to work for a nearby jewelry company and often brought his dates to Margon.

“He came in beautiful suits, with beautiful women,” Ms. Rivas said. “He doesn’t have any family here.